Denise Howard grew up on a Missouri farm surrounded by animals and nature, drawing constantly. She earned a BA in Art and a BS in Math/Computer Science concurrently from Truman State University, and later an MS in Computer Science from Ohio State University, focused on computer graphics. She worked for several Silicon Valley companies, was one of the developers of iPhoto at Apple, and earned movie credits on Antz and the Academy Award-winnning Shrek at PDI/Dreamworks. Software engineering left little time or energy for creating art for 25+ years.

Finally the urge to return to her art became too strong to ignore, so she committed to it as a second career and soon received local, national and international recognition and awards for her realist colored pencil and graphite work. Her art, and articles by and about her, have been published in several books and magazines, and she is popular as a workshop presenter. She is the author of 101 Textures in Colored Pencil (Walter Foster Publishing, 2017) and a co-author of The Complete Book of Textures for Artists (Walter Foster Publishing, 2020).

She is a Ten-Year Merit Signature Member of the Colored Pencil Society of America (CPSA), for which she is also the president. She is a Silver Signature Member of the United Kingdom Colored Pencil Society (UKCPS).

She lives in Santa Clara, California with her husband, two cats, and a garden full of native plants and hummingbirds.